Reformed Church in America

The Reformed Church in America is a Calvinist-Presbyterian mainline Protestant denomination in Canada and the United States which was founded in 1754 as the continuation of the Dutch Reformed Church established in New Amsterdam in 1628. The original Dutch community lived in New York City, the Hudson Valley, parts of New Jersey, southeastern Pennsylvania, southwestern Connecticut, and Long Island, and they were joined by 3,000 German settlers from the Palatinate in the early 18th century, with many of the Palatine Germans establishing Reformed churches iin upstate New York. In 1819, the Reformed Church in America became independent of the Dutch Reformed Church. From 1830 to 1850, ministers preached in rural areas in the Dutch language, but they later switched to English and dropped traditional Dutch clothing and customs. Immigration from the Netherlands in the mid-19th century led to the Church's spread into the Midwest, and it expanded into Canada after the end of World War II in 1945 as Dutch refugees emigrated there.